This invention relates to social networking systems and in particular to trust based user authentication in a social networking system.
Social networking systems have become an increasingly popular way for users to create connections with friends and interact with each other. Social networking systems store social information provided by users including (but not limited to) hometown, current city, education history, employment history, photos, and events the user participated in within the user's profile. Users use social networking systems to view other users' profiles, organize events, and invite friends to participate in those events.
Users within a social networking system are presumably connected based on trust and shared values/interests. But a social networking system can be abused as a platform to spread spam. For example, a spammer pretends to be a popular public figure, e.g., Lady Gaga, and a large number of people subscribe to or become his/her “friends” in an online social networking environment believing the spammer to be the public persona of the real public figure, Lady Gaga. When unsuspecting users are connected to this fake Lady Gaga (i.e., the spammer), the spammer can lure the users to visit the spammer's websites, post useless or harmful comments on the users' sites, and/or steal important user information.
Conventional user authentication methods have been used to authenticate users to detect spammers, such as manually checking the identifiers of these users, but these manual methods are computationally expensive and inefficient. In addition, there may be multiple individuals legitimately having the same name as a public figure. There is no automated way to determine which of these is the correct “public persona” of the public figure. To provide better services within a social networking system, it would be helpful to detect untrustworthy users posing as public figures and determine real public figures in an online social networking environment.